Recreation: Return of the Horse

The horse has long since been pushed off
the highways, and a decade ago it looked as if he might have lost out
on the backways as well. There were 4,500,000 horses in the country in
1959, the year that the U.S. Department of Agriculture took its last
horse census and decided to discontinue counting heads.

The Department quit at just the wrong moment; since then horses have
staged a surprising comeback, now total more than 7,000,000, of which
85% are saddle horses. Nor has the demand by any means peaked. Nearly
every...